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More "Elusive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... usual Mrs. Carstairs wore white, the fittest setting, Anstice thought, for her pale and tragic grace; but to-night she had thrown a wonderful Chinese scarf round her shoulders, and the deep blue ground, embroidered with black and green birds and flowers, gave an unusually distinctive note to her elusive personality. Opposite to her Iris, in her filmy grey-green frock, a big bunch of violets at her breast, wore the look of a nymph, some woodland creature whose fragrant charm and youthful freshness were in striking contrast to ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... English translations have been made. No one of these that we have been able to find, seems entirely satisfactory. There is an elusive quality to Pascal's style, and in losing this you seem to lose something of Pascal's thought. For with Pascal the thought and the style penetrate each other inextricably and almost indistinguishably. You cannot print a smile, an inflection ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... freely and tied cards on to presents but she felt unaccountably depressed. This, of course, was because dear little Vera whom she had known since a child, whom she had loved as a child, was leaving them and plunging into this strange, unknown adventure. What an uncertain thing marriage, what an elusive thing happiness! At nights she would dream of white satin figures shrouded in white tulle veils, of shy, passionate bridegrooms and shy, radiant brides. Sometimes she would see Vera's face and sometimes her own and often in the morning, she would find her pillow wet. "It will be you and Simpson ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... a naval skirmish in the Baltic, where the elusive Goeben has been engaged by the Russians with the usual result—the escape of the fugitive battle-cruiser behind the mined defences of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... completely under Government control. If the State can monopolize the manufacture and sale of spirits, as Russia has done, if it can, after the manner of Great Britain, control the making and sale of such a small, elusive substance as saccharin, it is ridiculous to suppose that it cannot keep itself fully informed of the existence of such elaborated machinery as is needed to make a modern rifle barrel. And it demands a very minimum of alertness, good faith, and good intentions for the various manufacturing countries ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... that. He had talked to two or three police officials and detectives that morning, and had found them singularly elusive and uncommunicative. One of them was the police-inspector who had been called to the Herapath Estate Office on the discovery of the murder; another was the detective who had accompanied him. Since the murder Triffitt had kept ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... forward and closed the door. A faint perfume stole to my nostrils—a vague, elusive breath of the East, reminiscent of strange days that, now, seemed to belong to a remote past. Karamaneh! that faint, indefinable perfume was part of her dainty personality; it may appear absurd—impossible—but many and many a time I had ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... to imitate them, but there is always something lacking. The flavor, the "bouquet," the aroma, is gone. The sun, the soil, the air, and even the spring water, seem to have something to do with it. Just what, nobody knows. Wit and humor are elusive,—they are unsubstantial. On the other hand, the Georgia watermelon is something solid. It may be handled and felt. It may be "thumped" and "plugged" and tested. Those who know what a watermelon is and should be, know that there is none to compare with the melons that are grown in Georgia, ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... the family? Those words, "head of the family," plunged him immediately into one of those internal combats in which interest and conscience struggled for the mastery—the one brutal, substantial, attacking vigorously with straight thrusts, the other elusive, breaking away by subtle disengagements—while the worthy Jansoulet, unconscious cause of the conflict, walked with long strides close by his young friend, inhaling the fresh air with delight at the end ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... Bad Lands in that hour of his small triumph, and left her perfumed token of appreciation in his hand. The Duke put it away in the pocket of his shirt beneath the calfskin vest, the faint delicacy of its perfume rising to his nostrils like the elusive scent of a violet for which one searches the woodland and ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... enter upon this great episode, truly the turning point in American history, without pausing for a glance at the character of Seward. The subject is elusive. His ablest biographer* plainly is so constantly on guard not to appear an apologist that he ends by reducing his portrait to a mere outline, wavering across a background of political details. The most recent study of Seward** ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... vanquished the other, too, except that this startled individual, waving his heat beam wildly in an attempt to catch the elusive, vanishing and reappearing figure, scored a lucky hit. There was a tremendous flare of flame, and the extraordinary form of Shadow appeared for the last time, a charred, flat body lying on the floor of the corridor like the shadow for which he ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... took the little handkerchief, which wrapped the leaf, once part of her bed. A faint, elusive scent still hung about it—something of her, still it seemed. He closed his eyes, there on the hard park bench, and let his fancies rove whither they would; and for a time it seemed to him a ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... friend, broad-shouldered, swinging along, pass down the street with the orange lamps throwing chains of light about him, was confronted again by that old elusive spirit that he had known so well at school. Peter liked him, Peter was glad to see him again, but there were so many other Peters, so many doors closed against intruders.... Bobby would always, to the end, be for Peter, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... possible development of style which shall come into being when realism or naturalism, ceasing to describe the ignoble, shall occupy itself with the attempt to render refinements, reticences, subtleties, and half-tones of a more elusive order. It is an aspiration, a counsel of perfection offered to a younger school by an artist in experiment, who declares the quest to be beyond his powers. It is ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... aware of what he did, he was in the opening of the alcove, handling that awkward fold—and again he drew breath, deep and slow through the nose; again the vague memory—again the elusive association. Was the scent—sweet as well as musty—was it in the curtain? But as he stooped, he saw what made him forget that vague odour: a crumpled bunch of the soft linen had been squeezed together, and ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... up the boy's schoolbook and was looking at the writing on the flyleaf again. Then he raised his head, eyes narrowing on the boy as though searching for some elusive memory connected with him—with his name in the Latin book—perhaps with the writing, which, somehow, had stirred in him, once more, the same odd and uncomfortable sensation which he had experienced when he ...
— Blue-Bird Weather • Robert W. Chambers
... engaged couples in the class to which Elizabeth belongs; nevertheless I felt it was the moment for judicious advice, knowing how ephemeral are the love-affairs of Elizabeth. No butterfly that flits from flower to flower could be more elusive than her young men. Our district must swarm with this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... funnel of clear air in which I stood, and they would, in a slow, graceful motion, accelerated somewhat towards the last, describe a downward and inward curve towards the lower part of my body before they dissolved. I thought of that elusive and yet clearly defined layer of mist that forms in the plane of contact between the cold air flowing from Mammoth Cave in Kentucky and the ambient air of a sultry summer day. [Footnote: See Burroughs' wonderful description of this ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... straight ahead, comprehending none of these things which lay before him as in a panorama. Instead, his memory was conjuring up a pair of subtle, blue-gray eyes, now pleading, now coquettish, now frankly defiant; two slim, white, wonderful hands; the echo of a pleasant, throaty laugh; a splendid, elusive, radiant-haired phantom. Truly, a woman of mystery! Who was this Isabel Thorne who, for months past, had been the storm-center and directing mind of a vast international intrigue which threatened the world with war? Who, this remarkable young woman who with ease ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... could report good luck. The woods goats, swift and elusive at best, were vanishing with the unicorns. The last cartridge had been fired and the bowmen, while improving all the time, were far from expert. The unicorns, which should have been their major source ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... is often elusive, for it is frequently difficult to appraise the effects of early environment in determining a man's bent. That ability can be transmitted there is no doubt, for this is borne out by general experience, as well ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... on the day before Christmas, I arranged with the Director of the Lister Institute for the loan of Dr. Arkwright of his staff and for the necessary apparatus to equip a laboratory at Bulford Cottage Hospital. It was a forlorn hope, but it was the only thing that could be done to try to get this elusive disease under control. I spent Christmas day in camp, and it was a melancholy day indeed. The men were all well looked after, and for those in the hospitals the day was made as bright as possible. It seemed years since we ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... the "red-backs" of the north had become a desirable luxury item for Terran tables. If a school of them were to be found in the vicinity no wonder this village was now deserted as its fleet went out to garner in the elusive but ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... these young people who had carved their own Fate in the very rock which now had shattered their lives, seemed to be searching for something vague, unavowed and mysterious which instinct told them was there, but which was so elusive, so intangible that the soul of each recoiled, even whilst ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... peered round the edge. He saw them laughing, flushed, silhouetted against the green, distant trees. Austin was looking at her with the light of passion in his eyes. She looked up at him, radiant, elusive, triumphant, with parted lips. ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... there arrives a lull in the hot race Wherein he doth for ever chase That flying and elusive shadow, rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... forebodings, and all day they could be seen in groups about the village discussing ways and means. Quarrels broke out, and parties disbanded in discouragement and bitterness. The road to the golden river seemed to grow longer, and the precious sand more elusive, from day to day. Here at Hazleton, where they had hoped to reach a gold region, nothing was doing. Those who had visited the Kisgagash Mountains to the north were lukewarm in their reports, and no one felt like stopping to explore. The cry ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... has been variously described as satanic, electric, and elusive. "Serpentine" would be far more accurate. Anyone in the least familiar with the famous Indian's style will at once see the ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... the summit of the rock was still shooting, though intermittently. It seemed to the rider that the man's target must be elusive or concealed, for the shooter's actions showed that he was irritated. The other man, too, was still shooting. The rider noted that he, too, seemed to be meeting with failure, for as the rider drew nearer he ...
— 'Drag' Harlan • Charles Alden Seltzer
... lukewarm naturalist, now waxed enthusiastic in the collection of specimens. She was running one day in pursuit of a gorgeous dragon-fly through the little wood that skirted the playing-fields, and, with her eyes fixed on her elusive quarry, she almost tumbled over Chrissie, who was sitting by the side ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... French woods and fields and gardens in full flower; swift, soft, moist equinoctial gales, blowing from the far-off orchards of Meudon, or the old market gardens of Suresnes in their autumnal decay, and laden, we do not know why, with strange, mysterious, troubling reminiscence too subtle and elusive to be expressed in any tongue—too sweet for any words! And then the dark December wind that comes down from the north, and brings the short, early twilights and the snow, and drives us home, pleasantly shivering, to the chimney-corner and ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... the southern sunlight of the town. The brown sails of the fishing-boats waved in translucid green; and the white field of the sheer cliff, and all the roofs, gables, spires, balconies, and the green of the verandahs were exquisitely indicated and elusive in the bright air; and the beach was loud with acrobats and comic minstrels, and nurse-maids lay on the pebbles reading novels, children with their clothes tied tightly about them were ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... and the earliest chroniclers of war recorded their observations, strategists and generals have been tantalized and confounded by the elusive goal of destroying the adversary's will to resist before, during, and after battle. Today, we believe that an unusual opportunity exists to determine whether or not this long-sought strategic goal of ...
— Shock and Awe - Achieving Rapid Dominance • Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade
... may be called a political poem, from its elusive reference to Home Rule. I was not sure on the point myself; for I thought the wearer of the 'blue cloak and birds' feathers,' must be a fine lady, perhaps laying enchantment on the fields. But I heard some one ask the Craoibhin ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... sure enough of Kitty, at first, to dare risk telling her about that little mistake of hers. She is such an elusive person that I spend all my time in wooing her, and can never lay flattering unction to my soul ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... doubt that now I am safe," he thought. His fine ear could detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current breaking against the point of the island, and he forgot himself in listening to them with interest. But even to his acute sense of hearing the sound was too elusive. ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... the work—introduced in connection with the demoniac characters—are inferior to the rest. They have occasionally a quaint, antique flavor, suggesting the diction of the Elizabethan lyrists, but without their delicate, elusive richness of melody. Here most we perceive the absence of that highest, ripest intellectual culture which can be acquired only through contact and conflict with other minds. It is not good for a poet to be alone. Even where the constructive faculty is absent, its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... sunset they came back and sat down on the old garden bench. Before them a sea of splendour, burning like a great jewel, stretched to the gateways of the west. The long headlands on either side were darkly purple, and the sun left behind him a vast, cloudless arc of fiery daffodil and elusive rose. Back over the orchard in a cool, green sky glimmered a crystal planet, and the night poured over them a clear wine of dew from her airy chalice. The spruces were rejoicing in the wind, and even the battered firs were singing of the sea. Old memories trooped into their hearts ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... attending to our wells for twenty years. In fact, long before our wells came into being, and I can honestly say that, though I am not by any means an unintelligent man, I know just as little about the Russian to-day as I did when I went there. He's the most elusive creature. You think you know him two days after you have met him. Two days later you find that you have changed all your opinions about him; and by the end of the first year, if you have kept a careful note of your observations and impressions in a ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... portrait of Vard is a failure," she admitted, "and I've never known why. If he'd been an obscure elusive type of villain, one could understand Lillo's missing the mark for once; but with ...
— The Greater Inclination • Edith Wharton
... finished. He told everything as he knew it both from An-ina and the mother of Marcel. Also that which he had learned first hand, and from the diaries of Marcel Brand. The story of the dead chemist who had abandoned everything, even life itself, in the pursuit of the elusive weed lost nothing from his wide sympathy. And the crude use of the drug by the Indians formed a picture ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... facts. So far as he helped on the substitution, he was a benefactor to all mankind. And yet, it would have been good to bare his hands and arms, and with them grasp and wrestle with the naked facts, elusive facts, despite their ruggedness. Nevertheless, he bravely smothered his desires. He even, and to himself, professed to ignore the way they multiplied, after an afternoon in the society of Professor ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... beginning, I have had a great deal of experience with these elusive 'facts,' and it chances that a practised though non-professional psychic with whom I have held many baffling sittings, is in the city. I may be able to induce her ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... been told to assure him, in case they ever managed to locate the elusive Roland, that he should not worry because of not being able to comply with the absurd conditions of Uncle Jerry's ridiculous will; because she had enough of this world's goods for both, and she meant to leave it all to him, Roland; so she begged him to come ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... so well provided with an apparently endless supply of appropriate remarks, was so kind, and yet so—what was the word? could it be mechanical?—that Robin for the hundredth time found himself pondering over something odd, half-remembered, elusive about the girl. Then there was the uncle; manifestly a man who had never before been required to assist at a school-treat, manifestly on this occasion an unhappy man, yet look how he worked while she sat idly watching, ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... has traveled abroad, has admired and perhaps coveted the gardens of England, France, and Italy. Their charm is undeniable, and thought to be too elusive for reproduction on American soil without the aid of landscape ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... were moving softly over the piano keys; melodies in minor, sad and haunting and elusive, melodies that had never been put on paper and would always be her own: in them she might leap from comedy to tragedy, from laughter to tears, and only she would know. The midnight adventure was forgotten, and the hero of it, too. With her ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... he was at that moment leisurely tying his white neckwear in his bed-chamber at Villa Cardross. And sometimes he whistled, tentatively, as though absorbed in mentally following an elusive air; sometimes he resumed a lighted cigarette which lay across the gilded stomach of a Chinese joss, sending a thin, high thread of smoke to the ceiling. He had begun his collection with one small idol; there were now nineteen, and ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... so long to kindle his blaze. He found a place sheltered from the wind, whittled many shavings from dead wood, and used his flint and steel until his hands ached, coaxing forth the elusive sparks and trying to make them ignite the wood. They died by hundreds, but, after infinite industry and patience, they took hold, and he sheltered the tiny and timid blaze with his body, lest it change its mind and ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... found ourselves faced with the first crime, that of the Cite Frochot, and our notice was drawn to the elusive Fantomas, we were unable to decide in what manner that hapless Mme. Raymond, whom we then took for Lady Beltham, had been done to death. Now, remember, Fandor, that during that night of mystery, hidden behind the curtains in Chaleck's study we heard weird rustlings ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... a huge-shouldered, long-armed slouch of a man, with a close-cropped head (flat at the back) upon which great hairy ears stood out like growths. His eyes were bloodshot and bulging, the left with an elusive cast in it that showed only now and then, when it testified to the kink in his brain. His nose, uneven in its downward trend, was so fat and wide and heavy that it fairly sprawled upon his face; and its cavernous, ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... him, muttering; the mill had unduly prolonged itself; he would end it. His fist struck at that face so elusive; but crashed against the wall; like a flash Steele's arm lifted. The great form ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... expression of the expert. Bell permitted him to ramble on about historic rings in general. But all the same he could see that Van Sneck was far from easy in his mind. Now and then a sudden gleam came into his eyes: memory played for the fragment of a second on a certain elusive ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... social bustle and the empty amenities of present-day existence to pass a few weeks in the comparative solitude of several pleasant companions "under the stars" in North-Western Rhodesia, where they can still catch a glimpse of the elusive zebras, with coats shining in the sun like burnished steel, and hear the persistent call of the honey-bird. At night the roar of lions may now and then cause them to turn in their sleep, and in their dreams they may have visions of the animals that have charmed ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... on the rings. The under part was pinkish wine crossed with a narrow white line at each segment. The claspers were prominent and sharp. The finishing touch of the exquisite creatign lay in the fact that in motion, in strong light the red wine shadings of the under side cast an intangible, elusive, rosy flush over the dark back of the moth that was the mast delicate and loveliest colour effect I ever have seen on marking of flower, ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... had been a fool, but straight. The woman—well, the woman was not the marrying sort. He was certain of that. She was elusive as a flame. Impatiently yet again he flung the thought of her from him. What did it matter to him? Why should he be haunted by her thus? He ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... used the word happy, even in his solitary thoughts. Happiness, that priceless elusive treasure, can come only to a heart at peace in the warm sunshine of love. Material things can make for contentment, but ah! how ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... which did not take place till full four years later, and which by all accounts supplied him with a faithful and excellent companion and nurse, and his children with a kind stepmother—little or nothing is again known of this elusive man of genius between the publication of the Miscellanies in 1743, and that of Tom Jones in 1749. The second marriage itself in November 1747; an interview which Joseph Warton had with him rather more than a year earlier (one of the very few direct interviews ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... not moralize long. He was squatting in the moss, a bone in his mouth, sucking at the shreds of life that still dyed it faintly pink. The sweet meaty taste, thin and elusive almost as a memory, maddened him. He closed his jaws on the bones and crunched. Sometimes it was the bone that broke, sometimes his teeth. Then he crushed the bones between rocks, pounded them to a pulp, and swallowed ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... Canada penetrating to different men with different suggestion, and touching here and there a pure and unworldly heart, such as Pere Etienne bore in his breast, with commiseration. The young priest did not conceive very clearly of the make and manner of the crime he suspected the elusive and mysterious stranger of committing; but he imagined that the great sum of money he knew him possessed of, was spoil of some sort; and he believed that Northwick's hesitation to employ it in any ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... and had beaux. She had worked in the ten-cent store until her misplaced generosity with the glass beads on her counter resulted in her being sent to a reformatory. But Birdie's bold attractions suffered in comparison with the elusive charm of the pink and white ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... not be sacrificed to anything virtually extrinsic; and her verses all show a strange cadence of inner rhythmical music. Lines are always daringly constructed, and the "thought-rhyme" appears frequently,—appealing, indeed, to an unrecognized sense more elusive than hearing. ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... to make a guess, I should suppose that you are that distinguished and elusive person whom the outside world refers to ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... clothes; even my flesh, and sit in my bones, like Sydney Smith,—the I in me retreating ever to an inner citadel; but I must stop with the feeling that something moves in there. That is not what my self IS, but what the elusive sprite feels like when I have got my finger on him. In daily experience, however, it is unnecessary to proceed to such extremities. The self, at a given moment of consciousness, is felt as one group of elements which form a foreground. The second group ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... He counted himself among the launched, no doubt, and had breasted seas; but the boy was alive, a trencherman lad, in the coming schoolmaster, and told him profitable facts concerning his condition; besides throwing a luminous ray on the arcane of our elusive youthful. If they have no stout zest for eating, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the life of any man when he says to himself, "I am happy." To Jack, these three words, never spoken, but somewhere within him articulate and peremptory, these three words almost overwhelmed him with their significance. He trembled for this treasure, so elusive, so transitory, perhaps, so surely ill deserved; he grew humble with the thought of his own unworthiness, and, though no believer in the ordinary sense, he began to feel the first stirring of religion. When Fetuao, ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... than six to one and he is increasing at a much greater rate than the European. Hence you have an inevitable conflict. Race lies at the root of the South African trouble and the racial reconciliation that Rhodes and Botha set their hopes upon remains an elusive quantity. ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... enactment which allows trustees to invest trust funds in their loans. Probably the safest course would be to leave sentiment to settle the matter, and pray to Providence to give us sensible sentiments. Actual restraints on the export of capital would be very difficult to enforce, for capital is an elusive commodity that cannot be stopped at the Customs houses. If we lent money to a friendly nation, and our friend was thereby enabled to lend to a likely foe, we should not have mended matters. The time is not yet ripe for a full discussion of this difficult and complicated ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... rewritten. He stated in this connection that he always had a picture in his mind when composing, which he aimed to reproduce in his work. "Ich habe immer ein Gemaelde in meinen Gedanken wenn ich am componiren bin, und arbeite nach demselben" (Thayer). Sometimes this picture was shadowy and elusive, as his gropings in the sketch-books show. He would then apply himself to the task of fixing the idea, writing and rewriting, until it stood out clearly in accordance with the concept already ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... lad, is writing an essay on "A Day in Church," in competition for a university scholarship. He gets on finely until he pauses for lack of a word. For nearly an hour he searches for this elusive thing, until suddenly he is told that the allotted time is up, and he has lost! Barrie ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the gridiron practically to themselves, for he cut a poor figure the first three times that he tried to reach the elusive quarter-back. Once Marvin caught him with a straight arm and sent him toppling out of his path, once Marvin dodged him completely, twirling on one heel and darting past him beyond reach, and once the little quarter-back wrenched himself loose ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... carry different notes over the wire and reproduce them by means of the electro-magnet. Although Bell did not know it, many others were struggling with the same problem, the answer to which proved most elusive. It gave Bell a starting-point, and the search for the ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... three accents which make the meter rather elusive at that point. The two small notes shown at the beginning of the third line seem to be spoken with no attempt at vocalization. They are notated, however, at the pitch of the speaking voice. The small note shown in the bottom line is ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... time Warwick was conscious that something more than mere grace or beauty had attracted him with increasing force toward this young woman. A suggestion, at first faint and elusive, of something familiar, had grown stronger when he heard her voice, and became more and more pronounced with each rod of their advance; and when she stopped finally before a gate, and, opening it, went into a yard shut off from the street by a row of dwarf ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... entities for a deity. This philosophy has never had the social power or the consistency of the theological philosophy; its entities have been mere abstractions. It has and has had such political power simply because so elusive. ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... on and the dam was completed, he gradually gathered around him an ardent little group of seeker after that most elusive of ...
— Regeneration • Charles Dye
... the tale of Diana, the Gipsy, the Goddess, the Woman, one in all and all in one and that one so wonderful, so elusive, so utterly feminine that I, being but a man and no great student in the Sex, may, in striving to set her before you in cold words, distort this dear image out of all semblance ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... pensive with anxiety; thin, ascetic lips that could smile in the most confidential manner or close tightly with grimness and fixed purpose. He was a man who was at the same time shy and determined, elusive and definite, but if there was one note in his bearing that predominated all others, it was a solemn and quiet sincerity. He seemed utterly without guile and ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... Mossman when the puck was dropped on the ice, and play began. There was a furious scramble, but Hugh came out of it first-best, for he bore away the little elusive rubber disc, and managed to carry it some distance down toward Keyport's goal before losing control. Then the fun became fast and furious, indeed. Those agile skaters whirled back and forth across the smooth ice with every imaginable turn ...
— The Chums of Scranton High at Ice Hockey • Donald Ferguson
... succession of separate definitions in thought at once, compare them with each other, and determine just where and how they part company; and the persons least able to do this are the very ones most in need of the information. The distinctions between words similar in meaning are often so fine and elusive as to tax the ingenuity of the accomplished scholar; yet when clearly apprehended they are as important for the purposes of language as the minute differences between similar substances are for the purposes of chemistry. Often definition itself is best ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... that reveal it, nor is it exhausted by all these sensations when they are added together; yet it contains nothing assignable but what they might conceivably reveal. As it lies in your fancy, then, this object, the reality, is a complex and elusive entity, the sum at once and the residuum of all particular impressions which, underlying the present one, have bequeathed to it their surviving linkage in discourse and consequently endowed it with a large part of its present character. With this hybrid object, sensuous ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... his bold step seemed justified. The directors were an elusive body, and even when got together they found it hard to act with anything like unanimity and despatch; but one afternoon Stephen Giles encountered Mr. Holbrook in the office of one of the hotels and was told that the plan was receiving favourable consideration and was not unlikely to be accepted. ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... there were more substantial ghosts about, as the story tells. Read the curious adventures that befell after Titania Chapman came to learn the book business in the mellow atmosphere of the second-hand bookshop of this novel. There was mystery connected with the elusive copy of Carlyle's Oliver Cromwell, which kept on disappearing from Roger's shelves. Some readers may remember that Roger Mifflin was the hero of Mr. Morley's first novel, Parnassus on Wheels, though this is in no sense a sequel, but ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... them! He would teach them that red-tape and officialism could only blunder blindly on at the heels of his elusive and lightfooted wariness. If they were bound to hold him down and delegitimatize him and keep him a pariah and a revolter against order, he would show them what he, alone, could do in ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... trace of his previous state of mind vanished, as the instantaneous and elusive trail of a bursting meteor vanishes on the profound blackness of the sky; it was the faint flicker of a painful thought, gone as soon as perceived, that nothing but her presence—after all—had the power to recall him to himself. He stared at her. She sat with her hands on her lap, looking down; ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... done by Ruskin in art up to his fortieth year, that he should turn, for practically the remainder of his life, to the seemingly vain and profitless task of a social reformer and regenerator of modern society, has to most men been a riddle too elusive and enigmatic to solve. And yet, in his earlier career, had he not himself prepared us for just such a departure as he took in the sixties, for in art was he not equally revolutionary and iconoclastic, as well as personally self-willed, passionate, and impulsive? Moreover, had not Mother ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... mention of him. She and James spent a long evening together, and she was entirely charming. James began to put behind him all the mystery and dark hints of evil. Clemency, although fond, was as elusive as a butterfly. She had feminine wiles to her finger tips, but she was quite innocent of the fact that they were wiles. It took the whole evening for the young man to secure a kiss or two, and have her upon ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... light she looked to him the masterpiece of God striving for the perfect in a woman's form. Her gown, gently stirred by the warm breeze, seemed a part of her, elusive, alive, feminine. The milk-white of bare throat and shoulder and rounded arm, the rise and fall of her breast, the soft lure of her eyes, the tender smile upon her lips, drew him slowly closer, closer to her. She lifted her face a little, raising her eyes until they ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... fascinate with the witchery of untrammeled existence. Two lines of a song from Twelfth Night give an attractive presentation of the Renaissance philosophy of the present as opposed to an elusive future:— ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... phantom is in love with me. But that love, too, is an illusion I create. No, do not come too close. Let me grow accustomed first to my madness. You are happy, eh? How marvelous your eyes! They were beautiful before when they crawled like round spiders through my brain. But elusive. They fled from me, my madness pursuing them ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... intercourse possessed by the two who looked and acted very like a pair of handsome boys. Moreover, Gerard distrusted himself, fearing to say too much, too soon. He was approaching Flavia carefully and delicately as a man striving to close his hand on some frail, elusive creature whose capture he scarcely dares hope possible. And she gave him no help. Her frank gentleness and impersonal cordiality gave neither encouragement nor discouragement, no ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... was regaling him with one of the choicest of Messer Sacchetti's paradoxes, gurgling, myself, at the humour of the thing I told. I paid no heed to the sign. I continued to expound my quip, as though we had the night before us in which to make its elusive humour clear. But out of the tail of my eye I watched my good friend Stefano, and I saw his right hand steal round to the region of his back where I knew his dagger to be slung. Yet was I patient. There should be no blundering through an excessive precipitancy. ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... conquering sleep, descending on mine eyes, First smites the brow with unresisted blow; Unseen, elusive, like old age, she tries To gather strength ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... went far beyond the point to which his methods had previously led him. It was, for all who heard it or came to know it, a revelation of the possibilities of tonal effect—this dim and wavering and elusive music, with its infinitely subtle gradations, its gossamer fineness of texture, its delicate sonorities, its strange and echoing dissonances, its singular richness of mood, its shadowy beauty, its exquisite and elaborate art—this music which drifted before the senses like iridescent ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... spearing desperately at an elusive potato as the train jerked and jolted over the rails at sixty miles an hour, "to see how often you can raise your coffee cup without spilling the coffee ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... time ceded his other possessions on this continent to England. In 1800, Napoleon had forced Spain to re-cede Louisiana to France, as the price of the First Consul's uncertain goodwill and other intangible or elusive favors. At this period, France desired to occupy the country, or at least to form a great seaport at New Orleans, the entrepot of the Mississippi, that might be of use to her against English warships in the region of the ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... began an elusive dance in and out among the palms but ever under the moving glare of a flaming torch. The eunuch, like some shaggy monster, doggedly followed her. After some minutes of this dancing-chase, Pilate cried, ...
— The Coming of the King • Bernie Babcock
... her father I was being drawn into such subtle devilish schemes that I felt to draw back must only bring upon my head the vengeance, through fear, of a man who was so entirely unscrupulous and so elusive that the police could ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux
... of the ways of modern pedagogy, and deep and complicated are the snares of the Tamil alphabet with its two hundred and sixteen elusive characters. Baffling, too, are the mysteries of number combination. "If six mangoes cost three annas, how much will one mango cost?" Arul never had an anna of her own, how should she know? The teachers bamboo falls on her hard, little hand, and two hot tears run down and drop on the ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... impression of transparency which invited the eyes to strain and peer, as if vision might be expected to reward an adequate effort. It was that liquid darkness which means not mist, but the utter absence of light on a clear air; and it was filled with elusive yet almost illuminating forest scents. To the keen nostrils of the man who was silently mounting the trail, it seemed as if these wild aromas almost enabled him to veritably see the trees which towered all about him, so clearly did they ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... should attempt to tamper with the cable, he could not understand, knowing the superior efficiency of the wireless system; but he thought she might be one of the elusive filibustering vessels reported to have been seen in the Gulf of Mexico several ...
— The Boy Scouts on Picket Duty • Robert Shaler
... a look of anxious solicitude. He was uncertain whether she spoke ironically or seriously. Only one thing was certain—that she was slipping from him again. She seemed so complex, paradoxical, elusive—and yet growing every moment ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... "play fair" with Slop-eye gradually restored his cheerfulness, and he walked slowly back to the hotel, looking in at many window displays as he went. Half shyly he paused before a window of women's wear; fine, filmy things, soft and elusive, and, he supposed, very expensive. He wondered if Reenie bought clothes like that to wear in her city home. And then he began to look for a brown sweater, and to move from window to window. And presently he ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... encroaching years there was little evidence of it in her opulent good looks. She had manifestly specialized in graceful idleness and was prepared to meet with superb confidence the competition of debutantes. The elusive shadow of lost illusions, of knowledge born of experience, was the only betrayal of ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... he is not in Russia," replied the Count. "He is a very elusive person, and one who tricks us every time. 'Mac the Spy,' as they call him at Whitehall, is the first secret agent in Europe—next, of course, to ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... How Generals talked with you, in splendid humours, And how the Worcestershires have gone to Wales; Up yonder trench each lineward regiment swings, Saying some shocking things; And here at dark sad diggers stand in hordes Waiting the late elusive Engineer, While glowing pipes illume yon notice-boards, That say, "No LIGHTS. YOU MUST ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... playthings—in Morocco. My friend's summary of his country's recent history is by no means complete, and, if he could revise it here would doubtless have far more interest. But it seemed advisable to get the Moorish point of view, and, having secured the curious elusive thing, to record it as nearly as ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... gorgeous sunset, that made him think of Helen May just because it was beautiful and because she would probably be gazing up at the crimson and gold and all the other elusive, swift-changing shades that go to make a barbaric sunset. Sure, she would be looking at it, unless she was still talking to that man, he thought jealously. It fretted him that he did not know who the fellow was. So he turned his thoughts away from the two ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... absolute an instinct in the human mind for the definite, the palpable, and the emphatic, as there is for the mysterious, the versatile, and the elusive. With some, method is a law, and taste severe in affairs, costume, exercise, social intercourse, and faith. The simplicity, directness, uniformity, and pure emphasis or grace of Sculpture have analogies in literature ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... or on still summer afternoons, when there came up from the hollow the sounds of hay-making—the scythe shearing through the grass, the clatter of the whetstone, the occasional country voices. The dialect, and the odd ideas expressed in it, worked their elusive magic over and over again. To hear a man commend the weather, rolling out his "Nice moarnin'" with the fat Surrey "R," or to be wished "Good-day, sir," in the high twanging voice of some cottage-woman or other, ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... beginning from the right. In the right aisle are paintings (modern) looking like frescoes, and representing the preaching of St. Denis, by Galand; and the history of Ste. Genevive—her childhood, recognition by St. Germain l'Auxerrois, miracles, etc., delicate and elusive works, by Puvis de Chavannes. The paintings of the South Transept represent episodes in the early history of France. Chronologically speaking, they begin from the east central corner. Choir, Death of Ste. Genevive, and Miracles before her Shrine, by Laurens. Apse of the tribune, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... toward God through all its darkness grope, And find within its deadened heart to sing These songs of sorrow, love, and faith, and hope? How did it catch that subtle undertone, That note in music heard not with the ears? How sound the elusive reed so seldom blown, Which stirs the soul or melts ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... Sonorous, elusive, came the sound. It was within a half mile now, and there was no mistaking the destination, the intent of its makers. "Honk! honk! honk! honk!" from many throats, in many keys, louder and louder, confused as children's voices ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... must not over-run Tom," said Ruth to her chum. "No knowing what by-path he might have tried in search of the elusive gasoline." ...
— Ruth Fielding Down East - Or, The Hermit of Beach Plum Point • Alice B. Emerson
... this voice recounted her feverish agitation for the unknown, her insatiable ideals, her imperative need to escape from the horrible reality of existence, to leap beyond the confines of thought, to grope towards the mists of elusive, unattainable art. The poignant tragedy of his past failures rent his heart. Gently he clasped the silent woman at his side, he sought refuge in her nearness, like a child who is inconsolable; he was blind to the sulkiness of the comedienne obliged to perform off-scene, in her leisure moments, ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... room Joan floated after the elusive ball. Sylvia watched her with a light breaking over ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... successful marriages are those which—'when the first sweet sting of love be past, the sweet that almost venom is,' develop into the temperate, unexacting, peaceful and harmonious unions which come under this heading. To the ardent youths and maidens—restless seekers after the elusive joy of life—who will have none of this prosaic and inglorious counsel, and who are prepared to stake their all on the belief that the first sweet sting of love is going to last for ever, I say: Get your roses-and-raptures over some other way; don't ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... therefore, if he were to be cheated of his reward. That either Ford or Miriam would attempt this he did not believe, even if between them the worst, from his point of view, was at the worst; but that an absurd, elusive principle which called itself chivalry, but really was effeminacy of will, might try to disarm him by an appeal to scruples he contemned, was the possibility he feared. He feared it because he estimated at its worth the force of restraint a sentimental civilization and a naA-ve people ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... gurgling song, brought me to my feet and I went on down the path listening. It was different from the note of a wren which it resembled, that of a Lincoln sparrow, I was sure, a rarity at the Manor, only one specimen of which Jerry possessed. But midway in my pursuit of the elusive bird I saw movement in the path in front of me and I caught a glimpse of leather leggins and a skirt. In a moment all thought of my Lincoln sparrow was gone from my head. At first I thought the visitor one of Jerry's guests, but as she approached, butterfly net in hand, I saw that it was Una Habberton. ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... "will do. Miss Childe and I came here to lunch, not to listen to maudlin memories of the Great War. Did I ever tell you that a Spaniard once compared me to that elusive bloom to be found only upon the ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... financial responsibility from his shoulders, his publishers, and perhaps half a dozen intimate friends, he was scarcely recognised in his true character. Indeed, his whereabouts were seldom known save to his agent and his only brother, so elusive was he and so careful to establish ...
— The Doctor of Pimlico - Being the Disclosure of a Great Crime • William Le Queux
... it to her, and asked if Roland was well, and her father; then alluded to her husband; but the unlettering elusive moon, bright only in the extension of her beams, would not tell him what story this face, once heaven to him, wore imprinted on it. Her smile upon a parted mouth struck him as two-edged in replying: 'I have good news to give you of them all: Roland is in garrison at Rouen, and will come when I telegraph. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... laid for that elusive glimmer in the sky, which began already to pale in lustre and diminish in size, as the stain of breath vanishes from a window pane. At the same time ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... flit before us; but in none do we meet with sentimentalism, despondency, or disconsolateness." But with their weird and minor strains, and their odd jumps from low tones to high, on first acquaintance they strike the hearer as strange and elusive. ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... it, and (need I mention?) approached it to his face, he fancied he could detect just a trace, just the faintest reminder, of a perfume—something like an afterthought of orris. It was by no means anodyne. It was a breath, a whisper, vague, elusive, hinting of things exquisite, intimate of things intimately feminine, exquisitely personal. I don't know how many times he repeated that manoeuvre of conveying the letter to his face; but I do know that when I was privileged to inspect it, a few months later, the only ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... not enchantment for the eyes of the metaphysician in this play of light, these nameless interfulgent colours which appear flimsy as the play of thought? For the glowing floating haze is made of nothing—of lines, of gleam, of unregulated splendour. And all this triumph of fluctuating light and elusive colour is quenched with the sun, smoulders into darkness, even as ideas in the obscure depths of the intelligence ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... in fact, spend the night there and the next night and the night after that. And, when three whole days and three nights had elapsed, not only had he failed to discover the elusive Lupin and his no less elusive companion, but he had not even observed the slightest clue upon which to ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... again, they are stated in larger units, as for instance diameters of the earth's orbit, the unit itself that should facilitate the grasping of the result, and which really is more manageable numerically, becomes itself elusive of the mental grasp: it comes in as an interpreter; and (as in some other cases) the interpreter is hardest to be understood of the two. If, finally, TIME be assumed as the exponent of the dreadful magnitudes, time combining itself with motion, as in the flight of ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... felicitous throughout. This poem contains many of its author's peculiar beauties and none of his faults; it was the outcome of the mood that can summon a rare spirit of art to express the gladdest thought and most elusive feeling." ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... herself realize what a hunger of loneliness was hers? Or Anna and Irby, with Madame between them. Could you, maybe, have guessed the veritable tempest beneath the maiden's serenity, or his inward gnashings against whatever it was that had blighted his hour with the elusive Flora? ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... pursuit of the elusive thread interwoven in modern literature, and made several notable discoveries. "Contemplation of the mountainous toils of Balzac and Dumas fills me with a kind of physical terror," he said to Don on one occasion. "It is an odd reflection ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... in a queer psychic way that is elusive, you know — strengthened and sweetened spiritually by our ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... the big lumber piles. Along their base lay half-melted snow. Soggy pools soaked the ground in the exposed places. Bob breathed deep of the clear air, keenly conscious of the freshness of it after the murky city. A sweet and delicate odour was abroad, an odour elusive yet pungent, an aroma of the open. The young man sniffed it eagerly, this essence of fresh sawdust, of new-cut pine, of sawlogs dripping from the water, of faint old reminiscence of cured lumber standing in the piles of the year before, and more fancifully of the balsam and spruce, the hemlock ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... choice collection of early Italian paintings, all of which will repay careful study. We note on the entrance wall, 1260, a Virgin and Child by Cimabue—if indeed we may now assign any work to that elusive personality.[204] L. of this is a genuine Giotto, 1312, described by Vasari: St. Francis receiving the Stigmata. In the predella, Vision of Pope Innocent III.; Papal Confirmation of the Rule; The Saint preaching to the Birds—each scene portrayed ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... humour is a singularly elusive thing, and I doubt if anyone alive can explain it; but its elusiveness gives it something of its charm; and, moreover, the illustrations which are necessary to an inquiry into its nature, its scope and meaning, are apt to be amusing without ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... soft radiance which seemed to wax and wane, to quiver almost to darkness and then to burn more clearly. It was like a dreamer's pulse, fluttering, pausing, leaping, in accord with his vision. And as I gazed at the sphere, I fancied I could see within it strange, elusive shapes, which changed and merged and faded from moment to moment, and yet grew always clearer and more suggestive. I bent forward, straining my eyes to see them better, to fathom ...
— The Gloved Hand • Burton E. Stevenson
... crouched aloft in his red lair below the fort, he might almost have claimed kin with his mighty prototypes of the Assarbanipal frieze. One wondered a little, seeing whose work he was; but probably it is easier for an artist to symbolize an heroic town than the abstract and elusive divinity who sheds light on the ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... council of officers, on November 11th, to determine the best course to pursue. The decision was unanimous to return to the Point of Pines and renew the search for the elusive Puerto de Monterey, which they believed they had left behind. This was at once acted upon, and the command took up the march in the afternoon of that day, returning by the route of its coming, and on the 27th ...
— The March of Portola - and, The Log of the San Carlos and Original Documents - Translated and Annotated • Zoeth S. Eldredge and E. J. Molera
... Perhaps had I been blessed with a mother, or a sister, or a female friend of another sort tenderly devoted to me, I might have thought it worth while to continue my present existence. I have long dreamt of such an unattainable creature, as you know, and she, this undiscoverable, elusive one, inspired my last volume; the imaginary woman alone, for, in spite of what has been said in some quarters, there is no real woman behind the title. She has continued to the last unrevealed, unmet, unwon. I think it desirable to mention this in order that no blame may attach ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... of the setting sun shed a ruddy tinge on the topmost branches of the trees as Durham reached where the road dipped to the stream. The subdued light in the pass made the distances elusive and turned the shadows into subtle mysteries of purpling greys. The air was full of the scent from the thickly growing vegetation, but, save for the rippling swish of the water trickling across the ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... flash and twinkle. Along the road came a hundred little basket phaetons, in which, almost always, a couple of ladies were sitting—ladies in white dresses and long white gloves, holding the reins and looking at the two Englishmen, whose nationality was not elusive, through thick blue veils tied tightly about their faces as if to guard their complexions. At last the young men came within sight of the sea again, and then, having interrogated a gardener over the paling of a ...
— An International Episode • Henry James
... which there was still an elusive fog that he did not try to shake off, accepted apparent ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... had six times descended upon her and she was doing her gentle, well-bred, conscientious best in six lively directions, but under it all she was forever Helen, forever the best beloved. She was getting rather beyond her depth but she was not giving up. Stephen, in discussion, had an elusive way of soaring into hazy ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... never been persuaded to hold it. Possibly it is because men feel so keenly the elusiveness of women that they grow weary in the quest of the real Herself. But, says Browning, they must not grow weary in it. Elusive though she be, her lover must not leave her uncaptured. For if love is the greatest adventure, it is also the longest. We cannot come to an end of it—and, if we were wise, should not ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... consider how undisciplined and individually independent they are. Let us then, on our side, play the game fairly. No doubt it is very exasperating to have the thing dragging on in the way it is doing, and the present intangible, elusive warfare is desperately irritating, but there is after all nothing unfair about these tactics of the Boers, nothing illegitimate in any way; they are merely the turning to account of natural advantages; and this being the case, we have no right to lose our tempers and ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... another side to his personality and practice, and one with which we are now more directly concerned; for the cases that especially appealed to him were of no ordinary kind, but rather of that intangible, elusive, and difficult nature best described as psychical afflictions; and, though he would have been the last person himself to approve of the title, it was beyond question that he was known more or less generally as the ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... fell silent and looked inquiringly at each other. Fortune was beginning to show herself elusive, even in the Sargasso, save to those ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... some!" chuckled the elusive voter, as he watched with delight their unsuccessful endeavors to locate him. "But there's lots of places yet that they hain't thought of; they hain't half looked for me yet. I may be in the well for all they know." Then he began to sing to ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... came up we set off again in pursuit of the elusive gold convoy. We could get no accurate information concerning it. Some said it was behind, others ahead. We never ran it down. It may well be that it was concealed in a ravine near the road a few yards from where ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... of the links of this vast chain of events which his sight could not take in. Thus he hoped to find in the historic recital examples which might support the moral truths of which he was conscious. Few single careers could satisfy this longing, being only incomplete parts of the elusive whole of the history of the world; one was a quarter, as it were, the other a half of the proof; imagination did the rest and completed them. From this, without doubt, sprang the fable. Man created it thus, because it was not given him to see more than himself ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... to-day the threads carried the searchers in amongst the icebergs and soared aloft over their crests—anon the clue was recovered beyond, and led towards Tent Island, then towards Inaccessible, then back to the bergs. Never was such an elusive thread. Darkness descended with the searchers on a strong scent for the Razor Backs: Bowers ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... to try to put into words a very singular and very elusive experience which visits me not infrequently. I cannot say when it began, but I first became aware of ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... her, of course," he said. "There must be a lever—but I don't know where to look for it in all this mess." He pointed to the revolving wheels. No, it might be a matter of days of experimenting in order to discover the elusive switch. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... has been of much value in hastening the fire from heaven. Often the reader is impatient to inform the loud-voiced suppliant that Baal has gone a-hunting. Yet it is alleged that the most humble bribe has at times sufficed to capture the elusive divinity. Schiller's rotten apples are classic, and Emerson lists a number of tested expedients, from a pound of tea to a night in a strange hotel. [Footnote: See the essay on Inspiration. Hazlitt says Coleridge liked to compose walking over uneven ground or breaking through straggling branches.] ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... rejecting the scandalous chronicle of Olympus or Asgard altogether, or giving it over to the comic graces of levity and irony, as in the Phaeacian story of Ares and Aphrodite, wherein the Phaeacian poet digressed from his tales of war in the spirit of Ariosto, and with an equally accomplished and elusive defiance of censure.[13] ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... whom the pilot had lived so long. His hair was fair, as was his skin under its sun tan. He was unusually light on his feet and possessed a wiry strength Raf could testify to. But there was that disconcerting habit of mind reading and other elusive differences. ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... day, until time for his call upon Agnes, Paul spends in nervous, troubled conjecture, but can find no solution of this elusive problem. The strain is terrible and his look is alert. He avoids all acquaintances and gives startled looks into vacancy, as if fearing invisible attack. With quick, furtive glances, his right hand grasping concealed dagger, Paul scans strange ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... exhilaration that had produced the letter to Cynthia and the resentment which had helped me to reason calmly with myself on the intrinsic nature of fascination in woman. Once more Audrey became the centre of my world. But our friendship, that elusive thing which had contrived to exist side by side with my love, had vanished. There was a breach between us which widened daily. ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... imaginative diction came intuitively, and both thought and language are felicitous throughout. This poem contains many of its author's peculiar beauties and none of his faults; it was the outcome of the mood that can summon a rare spirit of art to express the gladdest thought and most elusive feeling." ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... trying to meet Terry, but he is as elusive as any vagrant sunbeam. I feel it would do me a world of good to have a long heart-to-heart talk with him. If I could only see him once a week and have him sympathise with me in a brotherly fashion and hear him say, in ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... Soon I saw one I knew. Connie was making her way toward me. I wondered how I could ever have thought her plain. Pride lighted every feature. She led by the hand the most beautiful child I have ever seen. She is a few weeks younger than Jerrine[1] but much smaller. She had such an elusive beauty that I cannot describe it. One not acquainted with her story might have thought her dress out of taste out among the sand dunes and sage-brush in the hot sun, but I knew, and I felt the thrill of sheer blue silk, dainty patent-leather ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... them both again—Geoffrey, big and debonair as ever, his jolly blue eyes beaming at her delightedly, and Elisabeth, still with that same elusive atmosphere of charm which always seemed to cling about her like ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... again took some lunch in the saddle bag and started for that elusive spot we had christened Cummings' Lake. About three o'clock we found it—a beautiful patch of water in the heart of the forest, nestling like a jewel, ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson
... when Lenore retired, yet she found sleep elusive. The evening had made subtle, indefinable changes in her. She went over in mind all that had been said to her and which she felt, with the result that one thing remained to torment and perplex and thrill her—to keep Kurt ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... the laboratory was resounding with the fury of a riot sale in a bargain basement. Sounds of destruction, counterpointed with cries of pain and imprecations increased as the staff pursued maddeningly elusive animals through a growing jungle of toppled and overturning equipment. At the far end there was a shower of sparks and a flash of flame as something furry plunged into a network ...
— I Was a Teen-Age Secret Weapon • Richard Sabia
... Val that there was a faint shadow of irritation across the open good nature of Holmes' smile when he heard her answer. "That damsel is becoming very elusive nowadays," he observed as he sat down. "But ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... one of those beings whose rich magnetism of face and personality brings them close to you, not only for the present, but also for the past, one of those people who are apt to make you feel that you have known them before, forever, a feeling that flowers into elusive fragrances, suggestions, reminiscences, flown on the first stir of a ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... whose life is wrought In movements of melodious thought; In symphony, great wave on wave— Or fugue elusive, swift and grave; A singing land, whose lyric rhymes Float on the air like village chimes; Music and verse—the deepest part Of a whole ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... asked King, twisting at his scrubby little mustache. But if be wished to convey the impression of a man at his wits'end, he failed signally. "I? Nothing! She's the most elusive individual in Asia! One person in the world knows where she is, unless she has an accomplice. My information's negative. I know she has ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... naval skirmish in the Baltic, where the elusive Goeben has been engaged by the Russians with the usual result—the escape of the fugitive battle-cruiser behind the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... hung from a cross beam, and against this the candidates hurled themselves, endeavoring to clasp the elusive knees in a hard tackle. There were many failures, some of the lads missing the figure entirely and sliding along on their faces. Andy did fairly well, but if he looked for words of praise he ...
— Andy at Yale - The Great Quadrangle Mystery • Roy Eliot Stokes
... boarding-house on Chestnut Street, in Louisville. My father—God rest his soul—had passed away ten years before, and I was able to live comfortably upon the income of my modest inheritance, as I was his sole child, and my dear mother was to me but an elusive memory of childhood. Sometimes, in still evenings just before I lit my student's lamp, and I sat alone musing, I would catch vague glimpses of a sweet, pure face with calm, gray eyes—but that was all. No figure, no voice, not even her hair, but sometimes my mind would ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... with many others. It is only fair to state in addition that when a public medium is a fair mark for notoriety hunters, for amateur detectives and for sensational reporters, and when he is dealing with obscure elusive phenomena and has to defend himself before juries and judges who, as a rule, know nothing about the conditions which influence the phenomena, it would be wonderful if a man could get through without an occasional scandal. At the same time the whole system of paying by results, ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Never! It's past the Dreamer's Rock for us, my sweet, and out to the open sea. We'll slip our moorings to-night, and send word after! I must have you, and at once. I know what it means to see you escaping my hold. Flame-spirits are elusive." ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... looked inquiringly at each other. Fortune was beginning to show herself elusive, even in the Sargasso, save to those ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... bull had almost reached him, and then lightly leaped diagonally across his lowered neck. The second charge, come an instant after the first, before most men could even turn, he dodged. The third he swiftly side-stepped, thrust true, and dropped the great Utreran midway of a leap aimed at his elusive enemy. ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... that he told me, thinks the wedding guest, as he rises on the morrow morn. Or did he tell me, or did I only dream it? A light shadow cast by some invisible thing swiftly traverses the sunny face of nature and is gone. Did we see it, or imagine it? Even so elusive, so uncertain, so shadowy and phantom-like is the spiriting of this wonderful poem. "Poetry," says Coleridge, "gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood. It was so by me with Gray's 'Bard' and Collins' ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... this is a question with an elusive climax. It is like going up a mountain. Each successive peak appears in turn the summit, and yet there is always another pinnacle beyond. We have now settled that the Members are to be allotted to single-member constituencies ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... tenderly, half mockingly. There were silver candlesticks upon the spinet and the light from the tall wax tapers fell with a white radiance over the slender figure in brocade and lace, the gleaming shoulders, the beautiful face, and the shining hair. Her eyes were brilliant, her mouth all elusive, mocking, ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... Adeline de Montfort, but has a powerful and diabolical rival—Walleran—whose character combines the most dangerous qualities of Mrs. Radcliffe's villains with the magical gifts of a wizard. Fitzowen, not long before the day fixed for his wedding, is led astray, while hunting, by an elusive stag, a spectral monk and a "wandering fire," and arrives home in a thunderstorm to find his castle enveloped in total darkness and two of his servants stretched dead at his feet. He learns from his mother and sister, who are shut in a ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... people who really know me and love me seek me oftener at other seasons, when I am more at leisure, and can bid them to a more intimate companionship. They come to understand my finer moods and deeper secrets of beauty; the elusive loveliness which I leave behind me to lure on my true friends through the late autumn, they find and follow with the eye and heart of love; the rare and splendid aspects in which I often discover my presence in midwinter they enjoy all the more ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... forever touching the elusive chords of Mr. MacGentle's being; one cannot help loving him, or, if he be not real enough to love, bestowing upon him such affection as is inspired by some gentle symphony. Unfortunately, he figures but little in the coming pages, and in no active part; such, indeed, were unsuited ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... his early days, he did rise; he found consolation. But it was all without form. It was a sentiment, a mood,—philosophically bodiless. This indefinite mysticism was the real heart of the forest world, closer than hands or feet, but elusive, incapable of formulation, a presence, not an idea. Before the task of expressing it, the forest mystic stood helpless. Just what it was that he felt impinging upon him from every side he did not know. He was like a sensitive man, neither scientist nor poet, ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... not succeed in finding him," decided Ralph, as No. 999 started up. "I'm sorry." Dave had been pretty positive as to the identity of his cousin, and the elusive actions of his relative seemed to verify ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... been threatened with death, whilst liberal rewards were offered for the capture of these daring and impudent Englishmen. There was a sum of five thousand francs promised to the man who laid hands on the mysterious and elusive Scarlet Pimpernel. ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... watcher was complete as he heard her speak lovingly to the officer who had at last come back into her life. She spoke in French and—was it because of the language used or of the unusual excitement?—her voice took on a strange elusive quality utterly unlike the richness of the tones Mark loved so well, yet remained vibrant, haunting in its sibilant lightness. Never again would he hear it so. He longed to go, but there was no present way of escape, so he steeled his heart ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach
... and (need I mention?) approached it to his face, he fancied he could detect just a trace, just the faintest reminder, of a perfume—something like an afterthought of orris. It was by no means anodyne. It was a breath, a whisper, vague, elusive, hinting of things exquisite, intimate of things intimately feminine, exquisitely personal. I don't know how many times he repeated that manoeuvre of conveying the letter to his face; but I do know that when I was privileged to inspect ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... lighted corner where she ran to catch her car. There seemed always to be a pair of voluminous elderly matrons in attendance upon her, to daunt and chill him. She herself was unchanged; her soft, beneficent radiance, her elusive, coy charm, all her maddening quality of delicacy and ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... too absorbing to the mind of a common mariner to prevent any thoughts he might have finding room to grow and take shape; sea breezes, sea storms, sea calms; these were the setting of his knowledge and experience as he fared from port to port and from sea to sea. He is a very elusive figure in that environment of misty blue, very hard to hold and identify, very shy of our scrutiny, and inaccessible even to our speculation. If we would come up with him, and place ourselves in some kind of sympathy with the thoughts that were forming in his brain, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... at various ranches for the elusive Sary, he located her. But she was not elusive looking. She was six feet in height and would tip the scales easily at ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... of this revolving world. There were nights, festive with hoof and harness bell. There were cheery nights of homeward walks from the City office at six o'clock, under those sudden Octobral dusks, when, almost at a wink, London is transformed into one long lake of light. There were nights of elusive fog and bashful lamp when one made casual acquaintance on the way home with some darling little work-girl, Ethel, or Katie, or Mabel, brown-haired or golden, and walked with her and perhaps were allowed to kiss her Good-night ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... for the elusive treasure, Osbourne and Orr, not being able to cash the cheques with which they were paid for their work, were at last compelled to borrow the money with which to make their way back ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... all. The sound of a boy's penny whistle there in the grove or the meadow would separate itself more from the background of nature, and be a greater challenge to the ear, than is the strain of the thrush or the song of the sparrow. There is something elusive, indefinite, neutral, about bird-songs that makes them strike obliquely, as it were, upon the ear; and we are very apt to miss them. They are a part of nature, the Nature that lies about us, entirely occupied with her own affairs, and quite regardless of our presence. Hence it is with bird-songs ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... bearing. He thought he understood her attitude toward him—toward the whole world; and a flood of loving pity swept over him. Reaching the other side of the street, he found that she had disappeared. He looked up and down in the dusk, but caught no further sight of the elusive Miss Blair; and after lingering on the street for a half hour, he returned ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... they never referred to the matter again; Maurice did not know to this day, whether or how she had answered the letter. For, although she had forgiven him, she was not quite the same with him as before; a faint change had come over their relation to each other. It was something so elusive that he could not have defined it; yet nevertheless it existed, and he was often acutely conscious of it. It was not that she kept her thoughts to herself; but she did not say ALL she thought—that was it. And this shade of reserve, in ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such things at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a certain individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed; and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... garden was very pleasant, and in it was a summer house at the end of a moss-grown walk. One plant which gave me great delight was a large bush of rosemary. The smell of it always carried my mind back to peaceful times. It was like the odour of the middle ages, with that elusive suggestion of incense which reminded me of Gothic fanes and picturesque processions. Many elm trees fringed the fields, and made a welcome shade along the sides of the road. A little stream ran through the village and ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... nearer the exaltation of deathless youth in a deathless world than anything else in a temporary earth. It was a day on which even the jaded heart is in the mood to begin all over again, in renewed pursuit of the happiness which up to now has been elusive. To Derek, whose heart was by no means jaded, it was a day on which the instinctive hope of youth, which he supposed he had outlived, proved itself of one essence with the conscious passion ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... really tragic series of circumstances, at the most critical moment of the contest, Lupin was turning his back on the battlefield and going away, at haphazard, to seek, he knew not where, and beat, he knew not how, the most formidable and elusive enemy that he had ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... in a position of grotesque fright, the fear-sweat streaming down his face, Frederik Grimm peered about him through the flickering gloom. The place seemed peopled with elusive Shapes. His teeth clicked together as his loosened jaw was nerve-racked. He ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... to studying his hands. The fingers were long and slender, but flat, sinewy, and powerful. They seemed to express tenacity of purpose, a grip of whatever they undertook. Once more she looked at his profile, and again she was struck by an elusive familiarity. ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... surely. Il Passero, or The Sparrow. We call him so because he is always flitting about Europe, and always elusive." ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... of the exact room in which he was to be found, with cautions regarding the elusive nature of this individual. I said that he had been three times in my custody, and those three times he had slipped through my fingers. I have since thought that Inspector Standish did not credit a word ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... of his previous state of mind vanished, as the instantaneous and elusive trail of a bursting meteor vanishes on the profound blackness of the sky; it was the faint flicker of a painful thought, gone as soon as perceived, that nothing but her presence—after all—had the power ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... becomes retroactive; she herself is fancied later on as a four-eyed bitch (Atharva-Veda, iv. 20. 7). Similarly the epithet "broad-nosed" stands not in need of mythic interpretation, as soon as it has become a question of life-hunting dogs. Elusive and vague, I confess, is the persistent and important attribute "four-eyed." This touch is both old and widespread. The Avesta, the bible of the ancient Iranians, has reduced the Cerberus myth to stunted rudiments. In Vendidad, xiii. ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... flats, and it raises its bristling front in her way.... She has fled back to the opening again. I begin to wonder what unhappy musician lies hidden in this new ruin, behind the bars of this melancholy confusion. There is something familiar but elusive, like a face that one has known and loved and lost and met again after the cruel changes of intervening years. It conjures up oddly enough a vision of a long room in the twilight, and an acacia in silhouette against the pale gold of the western sky. ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... nigh, And thick their mortal shafts commission'd fly; When now a breaking surge, with forceful sway, Two, next Arion, furious tears away: Hurl'd on the crags, behold they gasp, they bleed! 730 And, groaning, cling upon the elusive weed; Another billow bursts in boundless roar! Arion sinks! and Memory views no more. Ha! total night and horror here preside, My stunn'd ear tingles to the whizzing tide; It is their funeral knell! and, ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... was near its end did I give up my quest, feeling very keenly disappointed. It then struck me that the cause of the elusive creature's behaviour was that she had been piqued at my discovery of her in one of her most secret hiding-places in the heart of the wood, and that it had pleased her to pay me ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... face at once a look of recognition, as if in this tangent of the judge he saw an old problem. He merely sighed and answered, "Who knows?" The words were spoken in a deep tone that gave them an elusive kind of significance. ...
— The Monster and Other Stories - The Monster; The Blue Hotel; His New Mittens • Stephen Crane
... last day! That was ominous. It sounded like monomania. So ghostly and elusive! I began to suspect my American ally ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... of turning an impassive face to Mr. Underwood's remark, I listened with just the hint of an elusive mischievous smile ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... gulf of mystery held us so that we forgot even our sphere. In time, as we grew more accustomed to the darkness, we could make out very small, dim, elusive shapes moving about among those needle-point illuminations. We peered amazed and incredulous, understanding so little that we could find no words to say. We could distinguish nothing that would give us a clue to the meaning of the ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... before leaving Prouty, it was not more than two o'clock before Wallie began to wonder what they would have for supper. They were not making fast time, for his horse stumbled badly and the pack-horses, both old and stiff, travelled slowly, so at three o'clock the elusive mountains seemed as far away ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... reticent and elusive soul which prompted his request, the minister now felt that he could not know; but perhaps the pang that Lemuel inflicted on himself had as much transport as anguish in it. He believed that he had for ever cut himself off from the companionship ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... life. His destiny called him, if he survived the slaughter of the war, to the shadowy girl in England. Yet he had done that for her. For no other woman could he ever in this life do that again. It was past love. Her brain boggled at an elusive spiritual idea. She was very young, flung cleanly trained from the convent into the war's terrific tragedy, wherein maiden romantic fancies were scorched in the tender bud. Only her honest traditions of marriage ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... after a rest, the referee called "Time!" Ware came stalking up jauntily and confidently; but Jumbo, instead of skulking, was up, and at, and on him like a wildcat. Ware had expected that the Lakerim youngster would pursue the same elusive tactics as before, and he was all amaze while Jumbo was seizing his left hand with his own left hand, and, darting round behind him, was bending Ware's arm backward and upward ...
— The Dozen from Lakerim • Rupert Hughes
... based primarily upon ownership of land, but they also include many other forms such as shares in banks, coal and other mines, railroads, city transportation systems, gas plants, industrial corporations. Even the most indefatigable tax assessors find it such a fruitless and elusive task in attempting to discover what personal property is held by these multimillionaires, that the assessment is usually a conjectural or haphazard performance. The extent of their land holdings is ...
— History of the Great American Fortunes, Vol. I - Conditions in Settlement and Colonial Times • Myers Gustavus
... art. I am deeply indebted to him for this insight. Quite aside from their intrinsic interest, linguistic forms and historical processes have the greatest possible diagnostic value for the understanding of some of the more difficult and elusive problems in the psychology of thought and in the strange, cumulative drift in the life of the human spirit that we call history or progress or evolution. This value depends chiefly on the unconscious and unrationalized nature of ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, accompanied by his guns, his four dogs, and two or three choice men of fashion—young bloods of the time—men with whom we shall become better acquainted as these chronicles go on—there to search for the toothsome and elusive canvas-back for which his ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... became aware that there was a faint acrid odour in the room. Elusive, intangible, it yet seemed to encompass her and the snoring man by her side, almost as a vapour might ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... a cockle-shell to your ear and notice its roar?" she asked. "That's how a Tea sounds when there're only women at it. When there're men it's more so. What is this?" She held her fork suspended for a moment. "It's awfully good, but very elusive. What do ...
— The Man in Lonely Land • Kate Langley Bosher
... narrower than the rest; while the vertical lines of the arrises of the flutings were made convex outward with a curve of the utmost beauty and delicacy. By these and other like refinements there was imparted to the monument an elasticity and vigor of aspect, an elusive and surprising beauty impossible to describe and not to be explained by the mere composition and general proportions, yet manifest ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... sensations that reveal it, nor is it exhausted by all these sensations when they are added together; yet it contains nothing assignable but what they might conceivably reveal. As it lies in your fancy, then, this object, the reality, is a complex and elusive entity, the sum at once and the residuum of all particular impressions which, underlying the present one, have bequeathed to it their surviving linkage in discourse and consequently endowed it with a large part of its ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... essay on Botticelli he is on firmer ground.' But among the first masterpieces winged by the sportsmen of the new criticism was the Hamilton Palace 'Assumption of the Virgin' (now proved to be by Botticini), to which Pater makes one of his elusive and delightful allusions. While the 'School of Giorgione,' which Mr. Benson thinks a little passe in the light of modern research is now in the movement. The latest bulletins of Giorgione, Pater would have been delighted ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... reality. For though he may not have the strictly regular features we naturally associate with one of his poise and matchless outline, there is enough of that quality, and more than enough of that additional elusive something which is an attraction in itself, to make for handsomeness in a marked degree. He, like his friend, has passed his fortieth year, but nowhere save in his abundant locks can one see any sign of approaching age. They are quite white—cut close, but quite white, so white they attracted ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... to buttress Spencer's contention in its weakest place and carry it deeper than Spencer did. But in fact, the exact limits he should assign to religious beliefs as an evolutionary function were still indeterminate in his system. He, like all cosmic philosophers, found this the most baffling and elusive of all his problems. Meantime, here in this little country church, he was to witness the supreme rite of the supreme religious belief. There was some compensation for his enforced attendance in that thought. He looked ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... pipe, and lighted it, staring off into the thicker spruce forest into which Scottie and his wife had fled. The entire force was on the lookout for Scottie Deane. For more than a year he had been as elusive as the little white ermine of the woods. He had outwitted the best men in the service, and his name was known to every man of the Royal Mounted from Calgary to Herschel Island. There was a price on his head, and fame for the man who captured ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... and wore veils if they stirred out of doors? Such customs could scarcely make a whole country mysterious. But now, though he had not yet landed, he knew that he would be compelled to acknowledge the indefinable mystery at which he had sneered. Already he fancied an elusive influence, like the touch of a ghost. It was in the pulsing azure of the sky; in the wild forms of the Atlas and far Kabyle mountains stretching into vague, pale distances; in the ivory white of the low-domed roofs that ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... of red fury swept to the beach comber's brain. Wordless, face distorted, he flung himself at the elusive Brice. ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... ground, things that just happen out of the blue. For fifteen successive springs I have tried to discover the first boy who brought marbles to school when marble-season came in, and I have never yet been able to put my finger on that elusive history-maker. So on this voyage, the fleet is started and stopped, landings are made, camping-places decided upon, and no ear can detect ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... as her husband gave him no advantage that he dared to press. He accepted the secret interviews she granted, and learned at last the part he had to play. On that promissory note which she had given him at the altar she paid the instalment of a few elusive kisses, and he discovered to his dismay that he must do some great thing to make himself worthy of her, before the note should be paid in full. It was she who had seen the possibilities of his connection with a union and of his interest in politics, and had suggested the ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... enough of Kitty, at first, to dare risk telling her about that little mistake of hers. She is such an elusive person that I spend all my time in wooing her, and can never lay the flattering unction to my soul that she is ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... imitation of existing facts. So far as he helped on the substitution, he was a benefactor to all mankind. And yet, it would have been good to bare his hands and arms, and with them grasp and wrestle with the naked facts, elusive facts, despite their ruggedness. Nevertheless, he bravely smothered his desires. He even, and to himself, professed to ignore the way they multiplied, after an afternoon in the society of Professor Opdyke. However, ignore them as he would and did, they burnt within him with an increasing ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... against the sky beyond. One might seek far and near, and scan the vast slope with alert and expectant gaze, and view naught of the semblance that from time immemorial has given the mountain its name. Yet the imagination needs but scant aid when suddenly the elusive simulacrum is revealed to the eye. In a certain slant of the diurnal light, even on bright nights at the full of the moon, sometimes in the uncanny electric flicker smitten from a storm-cloud, a gigantic ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and when they emerged again into the frosty morning air and were greeted by the dazzle of the sun, each was conscious of a deeper understanding. A new expression of interest and something of respect was visible in the Irishman's face as he looked down on the puzzling, elusive being whom he had picked up from the skirts of chance as he might have filched ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... difficult, but too great effusiveness is as disgusting as too great abruptness is unsatisfactory. The elusive but happy medium is the work ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... one of the smaller rooms, still questing for an elusive presence, she caught sight of someone that she knew, and the shadow of a frown passed across her face. The object of her faintly signalled displeasure was Courtenay Youghal, a political spur-winner who seemed absurdly youthful to a generation that had never heard of Pitt. ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... getting Mary Dunbar, that famous nurse, to care for our sick or dead. There is a tradition that a summer visitor once hired a "shay," and drove, all by herself, up to Horn o' the Moon, drawn on by the elusive splendor of its name. But she met such a dissuading flood of comment by the way as to startle her into the state of mind commonly associated with the Gully Road. Farmers, haying in the field, came forward, to lean on the ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... of any man when he says to himself, "I am happy." To Jack, these three words, never spoken, but somewhere within him articulate and peremptory, these three words almost overwhelmed him with their significance. He trembled for this treasure, so elusive, so transitory, perhaps, so surely ill deserved; he grew humble with the thought of his own unworthiness, and, though no believer in the ordinary sense, he began to feel the first stirring of religion. When Fetuao, with sweet shame, laid her head against his shoulder and told ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... pleased to joke, sir, and you are attempting to be elusive, but you will not slip through the fine meshes of evidence woven by the law in that ...
— The Tale of Lal - A Fantasy • Raymond Paton
... quality is very subtle, but very sharp and firm and unmistakable. It is not analogous to the commoner, slower-going elements, as heat, air, fire, water, but is nearer akin to that elusive but potent something we call electricity. It is abrupt, freaky, unexpected, and always communicates a little wholesome shock. It darts this way and that, and connects the far and the near in every line. There is always a leaping thread of light, and there is always a kind of ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... dream of love he had vainly followed. As he came back across the moors, for the first time for weeks his jealous love left him at peace. His had been a fanciful Sylvia, "holy, fair, and wise"; and what if mortal Sylvia were unkind, there was yet comfort in this elusive lady ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... Rathburn came home each night with a deeper frown on his face, and a fiercer oath as he caught sight of the dog. Down at Swaney's the men knew that Bill Rathburn was having a "streak o' poor luck"; the golden treasure he sought was proving elusive. Stub knew only that he must hide each night ...
— The Tangled Threads • Eleanor H. Porter
... heavy as the average lady would care to lift, and worth something like $1250 each. Two or four of these were tied on the back of a donkey and a train of them driven under guard to the town office, whence they were shipped to Mexico City, and finally made into those elusive things called coins, or sundry articles for the vainglorious, shipped abroad or stolen by revolutionists. On this same ground the old colonial Spaniards used to spread the ore in a cobbled patio, treat it with mercury, and drive mules round ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... tentative, hesitating, ambiguous hypotheses of Physical Science, transforming themselves afresh with every new discovery, seem, when the portentous mystery of Life's real secret confronts us, to be equally remote and elusive. ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... quite still, had come; yet there rested—somewhere—on the quiet day, a faint, pleasant, woody smell. It came to the editor of the "Herald" as he climbed to the top rail of the fence for a seat, and he drew a long, deep breath to get the elusive odor more luxuriously—and ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... came back and sat down on the old garden bench. Before them a sea of splendour, burning like a great jewel, stretched to the gateways of the west. The long headlands on either side were darkly purple, and the sun left behind him a vast, cloudless arc of fiery daffodil and elusive rose. Back over the orchard in a cool, green sky glimmered a crystal planet, and the night poured over them a clear wine of dew from her airy chalice. The spruces were rejoicing in the wind, and even the battered firs were singing of the sea. Old memories trooped ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... The elusive history of the magnetic compass has many points in common with that of the mechanical clock. Just as we have astronomical models from the earliest times, so we find knowledge of the loadstone and some of its properties. Then, parallel to the development of protoclocks in China throughout the middle ...
— On the Origin of Clockwork, Perpetual Motion Devices, and the Compass • Derek J. de Solla Price
... Government lax in its vigilance, and leaves it simply open to the charge of effeteness. There were contradictory rumours as to whether his house had ever been visited by the polizia; but it was a legible fact that his name was on the window, and it was understood that he was not without elusive contrivances in the event of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... loans. Probably the safest course would be to leave sentiment to settle the matter, and pray to Providence to give us sensible sentiments. Actual restraints on the export of capital would be very difficult to enforce, for capital is an elusive commodity that cannot be stopped at the Customs houses. If we lent money to a friendly nation, and our friend was thereby enabled to lend to a likely foe, we should not have mended matters. The time is not yet ripe for a full discussion of this difficult and complicated ...
— International Finance • Hartley Withers
... the daily fair-weather pastime of the male population of the town. At one time or another during the course of the day, practically every man in the place came down to the grove to shy horseshoes at the stationary but amazingly elusive pegs. It was not an uncommon thing for a merchant to close his place of business for an hour or so in order to keep an engagement to pitch horseshoes with ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... Elusive as rhymes be, And Bessie, with finger Uplifted, is warning That breakfast next morning (A subject she's scorning) Is ...
— Songs from Vagabondia • Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey
... for five weeks. The brute ranged in the vicinity of two or three villages about seven miles apart, but was seen most frequently near Lung-tao. He was as elusive as a will o' the wisp, killing a dog or goat in one village and by the time we had hurried across the mountains appearing in another spot a few miles away, leaving a trail of terrified natives who flocked to our camp to recount his depredations. He was in truth the "Great Invisible" ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... meeting was close at hand; the next town on the Jungle Circuit was preparing to receive the survivors. The owners were plotting to secure that elusive commodity known as get-away money; some of them would have been glad to mortgage their chances for a receipted feed bill. Last Chance had started five times and each time Hopwood had listened to a thrilling description of the ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... Garcilasso's poems were first published. Nothing, however, could be more remote from Garcilasso's nebulous half-pagan melancholy; we are no less distant from the pseudonymous nymphs of Cetina and Francisco de la Torre: the elegant Amaryllis of the one, the elusive Filis of the other, though destined to be re-incarnated by a tribe of later poets, find no place in these stately numbers. Luis de Leon does not emulate Alcazar's epigrammatic wit, nor Herrera's Petrarchan sweetness, nor Ercilla's tumultuous rhetoric. ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... the big, blue bow and at the soft, blue ruffly stuff on her shoulders—stuff that was just thin enough so that one caught elusive suggestions of the soft, pinky flesh beneath—and wondered vaguely why he had never noticed the beating in his throat before—and what would happen if he reached around and tilted back her chin and—"Thunder! I guess I've sure got 'em, all right!" he brought himself up angrily, and refrained ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... to Collins only in the different way in which his subconscious mind reacted to his howl. Collins, having once defined Breed's note, its sound so identical with that of the wolf howl yet so dissimilar in the elusive feeling which accompanied it, had no further doubt that he could thereafter identify Breed ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... to it, was so well provided with an apparently endless supply of appropriate remarks, was so kind, and yet so—what was the word? could it be mechanical?—that Robin for the hundredth time found himself pondering over something odd, half-remembered, elusive about the girl. Then there was the uncle; manifestly a man who had never before been required to assist at a school-treat, manifestly on this occasion an unhappy man, yet look how he worked while she sat idly watching, look how he laboured round with cakes and bread-and-butter, clumsily, ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... Browning says it), because the taking-for-granted ideal is essentially man's—woman has never been persuaded to hold it. Possibly it is because men feel so keenly the elusiveness of women that they grow weary in the quest of the real Herself. But, says Browning, they must not grow weary in it. Elusive though she be, her lover must not leave her uncaptured. For if love is the greatest adventure, it is also the longest. We cannot come to an end of it—and, if we were wise, should ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... to what he knew, as well as to keep from arousing those of others, his heart was telling a very different story all the time. He could see again the dainty grace with which she had danced for him, heard again that low voice breaking into a merry piping lilt, warmed once more to the living, elusive smile, at once so tender and mocking. He might set his will to preserve an even front to her gay charm, but it was beyond him to control the thrills that shot ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... syllables, work out an addition of the feet in the verse by the foot-rule, and you will seem to have traced every miracle back to its root in a natural product. Only, something, that is, everything, will have escaped you. As well dissect a corpse to find out the principle of life. That elusive something, that spirit, will be what distinguishes Coleridge's finest verse from the verse of, well, perhaps of every conscious artist in our language. For it is not, as in Blake, literally unconscious, and wavering on every breath of that unseen ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... building or remodeling, like cheese, is a matter of personal preference, it is not improper at this point to set forth some of the merits of both. With a fine old building, there is that elusive something called charm. Time has mellowed it and the countless feet that have crossed its threshold have worn its floors. The blackened bricks or stones of its fireplaces bespeak the generations that basked in the heat of the ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... wedding-clothes than for her daughter. Charlotte had not shed a tear when she took them out of the chest and shook off the sprigs of lavender which she had laid over them; but it seemed to her that she could smell that faint elusive breath of lavender across the meeting-house when Sylvia came in, and the rustle of her bridal-gown was as loud in her ears as if ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... all this, after my wrestle with this formidable disease and my triumph over so elusive an ailment, is it still your intention to support him in disinheriting me? Shall he interpret the laws as he will against his benefactor? Will you look on while he makes war upon nature? I obey nature, gentlemen of the jury, in saving ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... and summer before I know it. I treat the season as I do poetry. Sometimes I dissect a line which has fascinated me, or a poem, to expose the secret. But it folds and fades and changes under my glance as a cloud at twilight; and the beauty of the spring is as elusive as the foam upon a wave. In the midst of summer, the summer that we anticipated in January seems farther off. It sinks constantly into itself. The deep solitude of rest, the murmurous silence of woods at noon, these are as real in winter as when we ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... This sort of monotony became very tiresome presently, and even something worse. The spectacle of an entire nation groveling in contentment is an infuriating thing. We felt the lack of something in this community—a vague, an indefinable, an elusive something, and yet a lack. But after considerable thought we made out what it was—tramps. Let them go there, right now, in a body. It is utterly virgin soil. Passage is cheap. Every true patriot in America will help buy tickets. Whole armies of these excellent beings can be spared ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... later—but the wilful charm, the enigmatic fascination, of the still face. The eyes were long and half closed under finely arched brows, there was a minute patch at the right corner of a pale scarlet, smiling mouth; a pointed chin marked an elusive oval beneath black hair drawn down upon a long slim neck, hair to which was pinned an odd headdress of old gilt with, at the back, pendent ornamental strands of ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... long before our wells came into being, and I can honestly say that, though I am not by any means an unintelligent man, I know just as little about the Russian to-day as I did when I went there. He's the most elusive creature. You think you know him two days after you have met him. Two days later you find that you have changed all your opinions about him; and by the end of the first year, if you have kept a careful note of your observations and impressions in a diary, you will ...
— The Book of All-Power • Edgar Wallace
... note how elusive are the lives of many great men. Some of the greatest have hardly been known at all. Others are known only by glimpses and outlines. Some are known chiefly by myth and tradition. Nor does the effort to discover the details of such lives yield ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... should have been an unhappy and rebellious crew. But now the spell of adventure was upon us. Our savage guides moved silently and surely, and the forest was so mysterious and strange that I found its allurement all but irresistible. The slow, silent stream, on which now and then lights as faint and elusive as wisps of cloud played fitfully, reflected from I knew not where, had a fascination that I am sure the others felt as strongly as I. So we followed in silence and watched all that the dense blackness of the night ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes
... the difference in the faces he was scrutinizing. At the gambling tables the men saw and heard nothing of what went on about them. He walked patiently on his quest from group to group, unobserved by those about him, but without catching a sight of the elusive engineman. As he reached the end of the gambling-room, he hesitated for a moment and had finished his quest when, drawn by curiosity, he stopped for an instant to watch the scene about ...
— The Mountain Divide • Frank H. Spearman
... do we meet with sentimentalism, despondency, or disconsolateness." But with their weird and minor strains, and their odd jumps from low tones to high, on first acquaintance they strike the hearer as strange and elusive. ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough
... manner she rose and withdrew. But Barbara did not go to bed. She took that vacated seat at the window. And long after her breathing had ceased to be quick and sharp she was still wondering why the odor of stale alcohol should recall to her, with elusive vagueness, the threatening face of a red-haired riverman who found it hard ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... away from the butt of his .45. It came away faster than it had gone for it. Guns had appeared suddenly in the Texan's two hands. His draw had been so swift that nobody had caught the elusive movement. ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... half. Do you two want to cover the other half? Aw—forget it! Who's got time to figure all this? That old coot doped himself out a nice catch-dollar scheme, making us promise. Or was it a leg pull on a highly elusive proposition, where big sums and the vastness of space seem to match? Hell—I'm getting mixed ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... Didn't we take that dive in the river together? But he's an elusive chap, regular will-o'-the-wisp, messenger and spy of ours, and other things too, ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Diana Barry, rosy and dimpled, shadowed by the faithful Fred; Jane Andrews, neat and sensible and plain; Ruby Gillis, looking her handsomest and brightest in a cream silk blouse, with red geraniums in her golden hair; Gilbert Blythe and Charlie Sloane, both trying to keep as near the elusive Anne as possible; Carrie Sloane, looking pale and melancholy because, so it was reported, her father would not allow Oliver Kimball to come near the place; Moody Spurgeon MacPherson, whose round face and objectionable ears were ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in each of these fascinating little tales; something elusive and subtle in every one, something quaint or surprising, which catches the fancy and gives a sense of satisfaction like that felt when one discovers a rare flower in an unexpected place. I predict that "The Odd Number" will soon be found lying ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... too much caste and too much contact. We do not wish to find servants or scrubs in our sisters, nor do we wish at all times even to see our sisters. There must be elbow-room for mood and temperament, as well as high walls of defence. The social element is too shy and elusive, and will not, like a monkey, perform on demand; therefore our plan abjures all these poetic organizations, which have a great deal of cant and very little good companionship; it has no sentimentalism to offer, proposing an association of purses rather than of persons,—a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... of Edward Lear's elusive nonsense, as full of the flavor of subtile humor as its original. It is for male chorus, with an accompaniment for two pianos, well individualized and erudite. It is in her solo songs, however, that her ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... face, black hair, and haunting gaze, that follows as you move about the room." But his likeness was as difficult for the photographer, or the sun, to catch, as for the painter to put on canvas, for the peculiar fascination of the living man lay in himself, in the elusive charm of his smile, and in his manner of speech. However, his contemporaries have left their printed records of his appearance and his peculiar personality. Henley's perfect description in verse is too well known to need quotation. Ugly, Stevenson called himself, but this was not ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • E. Blantyre Simpson
... De Launay, without warning, spurred his horse into a run, swinging him at the same time from side to side of the road. Turned in his saddle, he raised his hand and the staccato rattle of his automatic sounded like the roll of a drum. The startled officers fired and missed his elusive form. They had their aim disarranged by the sudden jolt and stoppage of the car. De Launay had shot the two front tires and a ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... and, however monstrous and unspeakable might have been his acts, it would hardly do to treat him as if he were a junior. And the scheme had been definitely discouraged by Drummond, who had stated, without wrapping the gist of his remarks in elusive phrases, that in the event of a court-martial being held he would interview the president of the same and knock his head off. So Seymour's had fallen back on the punishment which from their earliest beginnings the public schools have meted out ...
— The White Feather • P. G. Wodehouse
... is thought of when we speak of death was absent from the room. In the numbness of everything, in the mother's attitude, in the indifference on the doctor's face there was something that attracted and touched the heart, that subtle, almost elusive beauty of human sorrow which men will not for a long time learn to understand and describe, and which it seems only music can convey. There was a feeling of beauty, too, in the austere stillness. Kirilov and his wife were silent and not ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of course, almost as tall as Joyce, with skirts almost as long, but it was not that which impressed him with the sense of change. It was a certain girlish winsomeness, something elusive, which cannot be defined, but which lends a charm like nothing else in all the world to the sweet unfolding of ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... which had first attracted me, was as yet wholly immature. But in the face itself there were signs of a coming change. Wherein it might lie I could not tell, but it was there, an intangible and wholly elusive thing. I think that a certain fear of it and what it might mean oppressed me with the sense of coming trouble. I was more fully conscious then than ever before of the moral ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as yet had not told upon her, of experience that had not availed to harden her, at least in so far as her exterior charm of personality was involved; a woman, in brief, who bore close inspection well, despite an elusive effect of maturity, not without its attraction for men. Kirkwood was impressed that it would be very easy to learn to like Mrs. Hallam ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... crystallization and mind's interpretation of these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by us. It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them, an attempt to describe experience. What is that supernal symphony of which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms part? We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from knowledge of wholes. But even those strains which we do hear, assure us how far we are yet from conceiving the possibilities of life, of power, of beauty which are ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... Newcastle, Maine. Any boy who has such a pair of shears, and a paper of screws in his pocket, can build and make to his heart's content, and the happy mother who has this tool on her work-table is done forever with breaking her back over the tool-chest, to find some particularly elusive ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 20, March 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
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